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 BioMed Central and the Open Archives Initiative
An increasing
number of journals are being archived on the Internet. The development
of common search standards to sift through this wealth of academic information
will be crucial to making it both accessible and fully searchable for
the academic community.
The Open
Archives Initiative (OAI) Metadata Harvesting Protocol is a set of
uniform standards which allow "metadata" on archive holdings
(i.e. a description of the information within the archive, eg title,
authors and abstract of a research article) to be automatically shared
between archives.
BioMed Central fully supports the OAI Metadata Harvesting
Protocol. Metadata for all the articles we publish is available via our
OAI interface. This data is already harvested and used by Citebase,
myOAI, NASA
Technical Reports and other services. Additionally, thanks to BioMed
Central's open access policy, repositories
may also use our OAI interface to obtain the full text XML of any open
access research article published by BioMed Central.
Technical Information (for developers)
BioMed Central supports
OAI protocol version
2.0.
The base URL for BioMed Central's OAI interface is:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/oai/2.0/
Metadata formats
Metadata for all articles is available in Dublin
Core format, and also in BioMed Central's own XML
article metadata format.
In addition, all research articles published by BioMed
Central are covered by our open access policy,
and the full text XML of these articles is available
as another 'metadata format'.
Sets
Each journal published by BioMed Central for all articles
is defined as a 'Set' within the BioMed Central OAI interface.
In addition, research articles and non-research articles
are defined as sets, to make it easy to harvest the full text XML of all
research articles.
Further information
General information can be found at the Open
Archives Initiative website.
Please address any specific queries about use of the
BMC OAI repository interface to oai@biomedcentral.com.
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